"If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away." - Victor Hugo It has been 65 years since "The Fountainhead" has been in print. Yet, it manages to hold on the force and impact that it had when it was first published in 1943 and within two years, became a bestseller and stayed that way ever since, epitomizing the sense of
individualism the author sought to convey for the first time through the book. An author can write, and does, of those things that he has experienced most intimately and holds most important to him. An overview of Ayn Rand''s works show her obvious obsession of the idea of the "
ideal man", which she believed the ultimate goal of humankind to be. She stated that the object and goal of her work is to project the idea of the
society as "how it should be" and not "how it is". Through "The Fountainhead", she gave form to the ideal man, and through "Atlas Shrugged", her last work of fiction, where she put forward the vision of the
perfect society, she claimed to find the purpose of her writing. That is where she put forward the new concept of a new kind of philosophy, "Objectivism", for the first time. "The Fountainhead" was a take at the idea of collective thought, then prevalent and preached furiously to people. Through a seemingly irrelevant backdrop of the profession of architecture and the life of a man so daringly original and religiously attached to his values (though not so literally), the story travels through the life of the protagonist Howard Roark, and of the people who stand by him and of the society that wages a crusade against him, ignorant of the cause themselves. The story maps out the constant struggles he has to face before he emerges triumphant with what is rightly his; his individuality. The parameters of his growth and degradation are": Peter Keating; the idyllic blue - eyed boy who has known Howard since he was a fellow student at the college he studied in, who, being more popular and successful than Howard initially is, is a person whose knowledge of things is as superficial as his amicability of nature is; Dominique Francon, the "ideal" woman, who is the perfect complimentary to Howard and loves him passionately, but marries two of the people most likely to destroy him; Ellsworth Toohey, the perfect altruist and well wisher and a person for the public''s cause, though in reality he is but a parasite who is able to function only because he is sustained on the wellness of the others, as opposed to the contrary image he projects cleverly, and finally; Gail Wynand, the publisher of the biggest media empire of New York, who believed till he stood up for his own that it was he that controlled the opinions of the people, a belief which, eventually, caused in the collapse of the empire. Each of the characters in the
novel portrays the stereotypes that dominated the society, each character a simplified and bared - out version of what they were conveying. Written in a time when the novels of the day revolved around romance and ideas of a society based on the ideals tradition, "The Fountainhead" was rejected by at least twelve publishers, one of who called it "too idealistic" before it finally accepted by Bobbs - Merrill. The rest, of course is history.
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